Read Online Worthy of Redemption by L. D. Davis - Free Book Online Page A

blocked the elevator doors from closing with his foot as he glared at me.
    “Where are you going?” he demanded.
    Mayson grabbed a hold of my other arm, forcing my briefcase to slide down my shoulder and hang at my elbow.
    “What are you doing, Sterling?” Mayson demanded. “She has to go to orientation and training this week. You know the routine.”
    “No, that will not work,” he said, tugging me towards him. “I need her to start now. We’re already far behind.”
    Mayson tugged me towards her. “If you’re already so far behind, then what’s another week or so?”
    Kyle pulled. “You’ve already taken too long to fill the position. A week or ‘so’ is detrimental.”
    In the elevator, the other employees and one FedEx guy watched Kyle and Mayson as if they were watching a tennis match and I was the ball. Only one person seemed irritated by the hold up, but she remained silent.
    “Dude, are you crazy?” Mayson snorted, pulling harder on me. “Just yeste rday you were crying about her lack of experience, but you won’t let her go to training? It’s as if you’re setting her up to fail .” She said the last part scathingly.
    His eyes narrowed as he pulled much harder than Mayson. I was sure that my arms were stretching and by the end of this, my knuckles would be dragging on the ground when I walked.
    “You were so confident about her abilities,” Kyle snarled. “You assured me that she knew what she was doing. If she is so capable of doing this position, then why does she need to spend a week and a half training?”
    Mayson’s mouth popped open and her eyes widened. She yanked me, hard, and started to speak in a high pitched tone, but I interrupted.
    “I am going to ask you both nicely to release me or this is going to get very ugly,” I said in a calm and steady voice.
    Mayson looked guilty and immediately released my arm with a quick apol ogy. Kyle, however, continued to hold on to me and glare. I looked down at his hand on my arm and back to his face.
    “Let’s not repeat history,” I said in a low voice. “Don’t make me embarrass you in your own building.”
    Any other guy would have released me, but Kyle was too proud to back down from a woman more than a foot smaller than him in front of eight other people. Ignoring the need to bring him down a peg, I spoke in a firm, but polite tone.
    “I am going to spend the morning getting oriented with a few things,” I said to him. “I still need an ID badge, an email set up, and to sign a few things. When I am finished, I will join you on the twenty-first floor.”
    “She can’t even go to the bathroom without an ID badge,” Mayson pointed out. The magnetic strips on all of the badges are what allowed the employees to move about the building without someone buzzing them in.
    Kyle looked from her to me. For a moment, I thought he was going to su ggest I pee myself or pee in a bucket in a corner, but he let out a sigh that I just barely noticed and released my arm.
    “You have until eleven,” he said, backing into the elevator. “And you better come pr epared.”
    His cold brown eyes bored into me until the door closed, breaking the co ntact.
    “I told you,” Mayson said as we walked down the corridor. “You don’t know what you’re getting yourself into.”
    You’d be surprised what I know…
    ~~~
    At ten minutes to eleven, I stepped back onto the elevator, toting a company issued laptop, a new ID badge with a hideous picture of me blinking, a stack of papers and booklets outlining company policies, procedures, perks and benefits and Kyle’s brunch that he ordered from the café around the corner and insisted that I deliver to him.
    When I walked into the first room full of cubicles, I was surprised to find how understaffed it was. Did everyone go to lunch early? Was there a Sterling Corp cut day that I was yet unaware of? There were twenty cubicles in the room and only half as many people. Everyone looked busy and frazzled and